Archive for the ‘Fortress Paper Media Coverage’ Category

The Globe & Mail three part series called ‘Talking to Entrepreneurs’ featured Chad Wasilenkoff, CEO Fortress Paper. In part three of the Globe and Mail’s Small Business Editor Katherine Scarrow’s feature video interview with Fortress Paper CEO Chad Wasilenkoff, where she called Chad Wasilenkoff, Fortress Paper a “born entrepreneur”.

Fortress Paper CEO Chad Wasilenkoff discusses growing up an entrepreneur, and why he’s always looking for a good deal in part 3 of Talking to Entrepreneurs

The Globe & Mail three part series called ‘Talking to Entrepreneurs’ featured Chad Wasilenkoff, CEO Fortress Paper.

In part three of the Globe and Mail’s Small Business Editor Katherine Scarrow’s feature video interview with Fortress Paper CEO Chad Wasilenkoff, where she called Chad Wasilenkoff, Fortress Paper a “born entrepreneur”.

Fortress Paper CEO Chad Wasilenkoff discusses growing up an entrepreneur, and why he’s always looking for a good deal in part 3 of Talking to Entrepreneurs

In part two of the Globe and Mail’s Small Business Editor Katherine Scarrow’s feature interview with Fortress Paper CEO Chad Wasilenkoff, they discuss how printing and protecting money is big business for Fortress Paper.

Mr. Wasilenkoff discusses Fortress Paper being the ‘sole maker’ of the Swiss Franc for thirty years and how Fortress Paper is in the final stages of the next series Swiss Franc that will come out next year and “be the most state of the art and have more counterfeit features than any other banknote in the world”.

To watch Part 2 of Fortress Paper in their three-part video series entitled Talking To Entrepreneurs, please click HERE.

Small Business Week will take place Oct. 16-22, and this year’s theme, according to the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), is “Power Up Your Business. Invest. Innovate. Grow’. For over thirty years, the BDC has organized Small Business Week to pay tribute to Canadian entrepreneurs.

BBC News visited Fortress Paper’s facility in Landquart, Switzerland this week to learn about the process of making banknotes.

In a video featured in the BBC’s Business section, Marco Ziethen, the production manager at Landquart, takes reporter Lucy Burton through a step-by-step guide to manufacturing banknotes. From importing, refining and bleaching cotton, Ziethen showed how cotton gets turned into currency. Ziethen also explained how, as the paper is being made, security features are embedded in order to prevent counterfeiting of whatever currency is being produced.

The Landquart facility produces an astonishing number of banknotes each day, said the BBC.

“Each pallet has 18,000 sheets of paper on it. Each sheet will eventually be cut into 54 notes. That is an impressive 972,000 notes on each pallet. The mill runs 24 hours a day and it takes half an hour to make a pallet. So, overall, the mill can turn out around 46,656,000 notes per day,” Burton wrote. “If they are making 500-euro notes that day, the amount of money passing through these doors is simply mind-boggling.”

Vancouver-based Fortress Paper Ltd., has made significant strides in production since they began running the Swiss mill, going from “producing less than 1,000 tonnes of paper per year to 10,000 tonnes per year,” according to the BBC article.

Getting to this point, however hasn’t been easy. In another video posted on their site, Fortress Paper CEO Chad Wasilenkoff said the business provided some initial challenges.

“The banknote and passport industry is a very closed group of people,” he said. “A lot of the companies that are operating in this space have been operating since the 1500s or 1600s so we’re a fairly new entry into this.”

Getting reference orders and new contracts with national banks can be challenging, said Wasilenkoff, but Fortress has made some impressive in-roads acquiring large contracts with countries such as Switzerland to produce the Swiss franc – considered to be an industry standard in security.

In addition to these contracts, the banknote industry is one that is perpetually in flux. As technologies change, national banks have to keep updating security features on their banknotes to curb counterfeiting.

“Fortress hopes that the Landquart mill can help banks to ‘stay ahead of the curve’ and of course – make some money in the process,” Burton wrote.

Fortress Paper Ltd. CEO Chad Wasilenkoff appeared on the Business News Network this week to talk about the resurgence of the Canadian forestry sector thanks to diversification of products and forward thinking attitudes in the industry.

The forestry sector has “gone through a couple of challenging decades,” he said on Tuesday. “So we now need to change that sector and drive forth with new innovation and cutting edge technology to remain globally competitive.”

In the past, the forestry sector was mainly concerned with just wood and pulp. Changing that direction is what is allowing the forestry sector to thrive once again, said Wasilenkoff.

Echoing some of the themes found in an article recently published in the Vancouver Sun and the Windsor Star, Wasilenkoff said today’s foresty sector is now driven by high-tech initiatives, focusing on areas such as biochemistry, genetics, computer modeling, satellite imagery, and digital processing – among others.

The industry now is “more of a biorefiner,” Wasilenkoff said. “We’re taking the wood, we’re breaking it down to the molecular level and extracting as many products as we can to get as much value out of that wood as possible.”

Wasilenkoff also spoke about the Bio-Pathways project – a government sponsored initiative to further research and development in the sector – as well as his own company’s plans for the future with their dissolving pulp mill located in Thurso, Quebec.

Wasilenkoff was acknowledged this year for picking up the bankrupt pulp mill in Thurso, Quebec and acquiring Optical Security Assets from the Bank of Canada, a division that makes security threads for paper money. His original $2-million investment in Fortress is worth 80 million today, and his stock is up 300% over the last year.

The acquisition of the Bank of Canada’s division of Optical Security Material was described by Brett as a “relatively small, but pretty interesting one.”

According to Brett, the purchase will lower costs for Fortress and make them more competitive. They will be able to produce something themselves that they had to go elsewhere to buy in the past, which in turn will allow them to push forward with their business.

Chad Wasilenkoff of the thriving North Vancouver company Fortress Paper was named Entrepreneur of the Year on Tuesday by Ernst & Young.

The 38-year-old Fortress board chair and CEO started the company in 2006 with a focus on international specialty and security products — including paper stock for currency and passports — and has seen sales grow to more than $200 million a year.

Share prices for the TSX-traded company have increased about sixfold over that time.

Ernst & Young presented him with the Pacific region award at a Tuesday-evening event attended by 1,300 members of the B.C. business community.

“Chad is a shining example of how our British Columbia entrepreneurs are demonstrating they’re not afraid of the shakeup of an economic downturn,” event director Fred Withers said in a news release.

“Instead, Chad saw an opportunity to up the competitive ante by focusing on innovation, enhancing Fortress’s presence in new markets, and ultimately emerging stronger than ever before.”

Peter Brown, founder and chair of Canaccord Financial, received the 2010 Pacific region Lifetime Achievement Award “in recognition of his outstanding support of B.C.’s business community and his significant achievements as an entrepreneur,” the news release said.

Ernst & Young also presented awards in seven entrepreneur categories.

Charles Kim, president and CEO of Trans Pac Group of Companies, won for business-to-business products and services. Ernst & Young said Trans Pac is primarily a wood products business that specializes in log and lumber exports to Asian markets. Samir Manji, chairman, president and CEO of Amica Mature Lifestyles, also won for business-to-consumer products and services. Amica is a leader in the management, marketing, design and development of luxury housing and services for mature lifestyles, Ernst & Young said.Elton Pereira, co-founder, president and CEO of ParetoLogic, Inc. of Victoria, won for information technology. ParetoLogic creates a wide range of computer security and utility programs, Ernst & Young said.Nicole von Stefenelli, founder and CEO of Richmond’s Urban Impact Recycling Ltd., won for Cleantech. Urban Impact is a commercial transportation and processing company specializing in recycling, shredding and waste management services. Janice Abbott, CEO of Vancouver’s Atira Property Management, won for social entrepreneur. Atira provides property management services for strata corporations, developers, rental properties, non-profit housing, and housing cooperatives in Metro Vancouver. The company uses all profits to fund the Atira Women’s Resource Society’s housing and support programs for women and children who have been affected by violence, Ernst & Young said.Peter Barnes, CEO of Vancouver’s Silver Wheaton Corp., won for mining and metals. The company has quickly positioned itself as the largest metals streaming company in the world, Ernst & Young noted.Emad Yacoub, president and CEO of the Glowbal Restaurant Group of Vancouver, took the award for hospitality and tourism. Glowbal group is composed of six restaurants, two lounges and a full-service catering company.

Driven by the imperatives of globalized economics and digital technology, Ottawa’s pulp-and-paper heritage has been reduced to a remnant.

The forestry industry that built the Ottawa-Gatineau economy appears to be on its last legs.

Hammered by the Internet’s growing grip on personal communications, the rich Canadian dollar and intense competition, the forestry industry continues to slash operations in the hopes of finding a smaller, profitable core.

The industry, which employed 5,000 people just 20 years ago, today has dwindled as Domtar-Eddy mills in Ottawa, an AbitibiBowater mill in Gatineau, a Smurfit-Stone mill at Portage, and Domtar mills in Cornwall slashed staff and finally closed. Fewer than 1,200 jobs remain, focused on a few niche markets far removed from the newsprint and lumber products that drove the industry for 150 years.

Next to go could be 200 jobs at Papier Masson, a newsprint operation in the east end of Gatineau, which was founded James Maclaren, a pulp and paper pioneer, and later owned by Noranda.

White Birch Paper of Connecticut, Papier Masson’s current owner, has hired Lazard Freres, the New York private banker that helped sell Nortel assets, to find new owners for three mills in Quebec and one in the U.S.

White Birch, operating under bankruptcy protection since February, opened the doors to prospective bidders last month.

The threat is there will be no bidders and that some mills will close in a major restructuring, adding to the thousands of lost jobs in the industry.

Certainly, the relentless march of the Internet into every corner of human communications is destroying demand for newsprint, telephone directories, copying paper, books, magazines and glossy printed advertising across the Western world.

The result is that mills that employed thousands and drove the industry for more than 80 years are being sold for less than $3 million each.

One huge AbitibiBowater mill in Thunder Bay sold for just $100,000 because of environmental cleanup issues.

The recently upgraded machinery in four former AbitibiBowater mills sold for just $5 million — not much more than scrap value.

The real value now is in the land, including about 40 acres controlled by Domtar in the heart of Hull across the Chaudière Bridge and Chaudière Island into Ottawa.

However, while the Ottawa regional industry is in deep trouble, new profitable product lines are emerging and demand for older products is rebounding, at least temporarily.

The trouble is that most of the Ottawa regional mills are too big or too old to be revived. With governments taking a hands-off approach — after spending billions bailing out GM and Chrysler — bankruptcy courts will decide the fate of underfunded pension plans, unpaid severance and struggling suppliers.

The federal government finally rolled out a $170-million investment program this week, too late for most Ottawa companies.

“The forestry industry employs more people in more places across Canada than the auto industry, but governments have turned their backs,” said Kim Ginter, a vice-president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union.

“Many mills are competitive, but need investment. We still have the best source of fibre in Canada, but, once the mills go, it will be very hard to get them back.”

For the few survivors, there could be light at the end of the tunnel.

After years of declining sales and heavy losses, sales of many forestry products companies rebounded in the last six months.

It wasn’t much, just two per cent in the case of Domtar and other companies, but it surprised analysts and had business leaders and bankruptcy monitors scratching their heads. They had expected declines of at least two per cent.

Sales of AbitibiBowater rose 2.6 per cent between April and May, though the wounded newsprint giant is mired in bankruptcy.

Even before it shut the huge Gatineau mill this spring, AbitibiBowater had slashed newsprint production by 3.4 million metric tonnes or 32 per cent since 2007. It also sold off $940 million in assets, including $615 million in a Quebec power company.

A surprised bankruptcy monitor reported last month that White Birch sales were not significantly hurt despite the stigma of defaulting on loans and pension obligations and seeking court protection from creditors.

Sales at Papier Masson were 18 per cent higher than the monitor predicted for the June quarter, and the White Birch cash burn was 70 per cent lower than forecast.

The reason is basic economics: Deep, permanent cuts to production mean that prices jump with the smallest improvement in sales. While demand for newsprint continues to fall, the deep production cuts of the 2008-2009 recession were deeper than immediately necessary.

The result is the price of pulp was more than 50 per cent higher in the June quarter from a year earlier, and Domtar is running hard in a bid to keep up.

Domtar chief executive John Williams told an industry conference: “If you look at tissue, if you look at toweling, if you look at printing and writing, in the geographies where we are selling, those markets are actually growing. So we see a long-term pretty positive trend for pulp.”

His company converted a Massachusetts mill from newsprint pulp to fluff pulp.

“If you take fluff pulp, it’s largely used in diaper markets and in the incontinence marketplace. That’s a very fast-growing market both in developed economies and developing countries because of the demographic.”

Fluff pulp doesn’t have the brawny feel of the traditional products like lumber and newsprint that defined the industry and Stompin’ Tom Connors is unlikely to add a new verse about fluff pulp or air-laid superabsorbent paper to Big Joe Mufferaw, his ballad celebrating the Ottawa Valley logger and raftsman, but fluff pulp is immune to the Internet.

Glatfelter, a Pennsylvania specialty paper producer that makes tea bags and labels, bought the Concert Industries plant near the Gatineau airport in January for $246.5 million. It employs 285 people making super-absorbent paper sold to companies like Procter & Gamble and Johnson&Johnson.

It is primarily used in feminine hygiene products, a market that is growing about five per cent annually as the combination of growing prosperity and a huge young population opens new markets.

Farther east in Thurso, the moribund Fraser Pulp mill, once owned by James Maclaren, is being revived after it was closed a year ago. Fortress Paper is converting the mill to produce cellulose used in rayon, a cheaper, more environmentally-sound alternative to cotton.

“The forest products industry will continue to decline and there will be more pain,” Fortess founder Chad Wasilenkoff said.

“But there are still specialty niche production operations available at attractive prices which can yield good profits.”

While buying the Thurso pulp mill makes sense, he said that buying newsprint mills in North America did not. “This is still an industry that is profitable only about one year in 10.”

The share price of his company has quadrupled in the last year in part because of two profitable mills in Europe that produce paper for the banknote and wallpaper industry.

Better still is the Kruger Products mill on Rue Laurier next to the Museum of Civilization. For much of its 70-year history, it had a water tower with a White Swan logo that made it a landmark.

Today it is the sole survivor of the E.B. Eddy-Domtar mills, which, for 160 years, stretched from the Museum of Civilization site to the Chaudière Bridge and onto Lebreton Flats.

Kruger employs 475 people at the mill and another plant in Hull that processes and packages the material.

It is spending $4.8 million with Quebec government assistance to capture lost steam, reduce operating expenses and reduce the carbon footprint of machines that have been running for 60 years.

With backing from governments, companies like Domtar are investing in new technology to make operations cleaner, greener and more efficient.

Domtar is investing $32 million in new technology to create nanocrystaline cellulose used in optically-reflective films, high-durability varnishes and bioplastics.

The biggest problem for the North American newsprint mills is they are situated in the wrong places.

There is growing demand in developing countries, but newsprint is heavy and expensive to ship. This spring, Canadian newsprint sales to Asia tripled, with two-thirds of the business in India, as buyers stepped aggressively into markets to rebuild inventories depleted during the recession.

No one expects this trend to continue, however. The newsprint industry is still bracing for reductions averaging four per cent annually in demand.

“The paper industry is not going to die,” says Martine Hamel of the Pulp and Paper Products Council. “It faces major challenges, which will mean it will continue to get smaller and focused on different products.

“But the decline will eventually level off and we will still have an important industry and significant employer.”

The first time Dan Buckle walked into the headquarters of Fortress Paper Ltd., he didn’t know what to make of it.

Located above a McDonald’s in North Vancouver, the dark, small office has no interior walls and features a pool table in lieu of a boardroom table. The first thing to greet visitors is a five-foot-tall wooden statue of Buddha.

“I remember walking in, ‘What the heck is this place?’ ” said Mr. Buckle, first an auditor of the company and now its finance director.

The operation, whose value has more than quadrupled to $360-million in the past year, is the brainchild of 38-year-old Chad Wasilenkoff, a deep-value investor who has made his latest fortune in Canada’s most unloved sector – forestry.

He’s in the midst of pulling off his biggest deal yet – resuscitating a dead pulp mill in Quebec. Scraping through the corners of the global bargain bin, he has a dozen more potential deals on the go, from Canada and China to Russia and South Africa, all in a mission to get his company to $1-billion in market capitalization.

Like other deep-value investors, Mr. Wasilenkoff searches for overlooked assets selling at great discounts. But deep-value investing can be a siren’s call: What looks like a deal can be a disaster.

So far Mr. Wasilenkoff has avoided missteps. When he started Fortress four summers ago, he spotted potential in pulp and paper, an area most investors shunned because of concerns over global overproduction. As a result, assets were available cheap.

“If [anything’s] 98 per cent off, I want two,” said Mr. Wasilenkoff in an interview over wings and beer at East Side Mario’s, a favoured haunt. He acknowledges it takes confidence to operate in areas most investors regard with alarm. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called crazy. The more times I’m told I’m wrong, the more I know I’m right.”

He gets called crazy less often now. Joel Lusman, head of New York hedge fund Lusman Capital Management LLC, first heard of Mr. Wasilenkoff in early 2010. When the Quebec deal was announced, he quickly bought hundreds of thousands of Fortress shares. “This is one of the smartest deals I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Lusman said.

Mr. Wasilenkoff first made his name as a broker at investment bank Canaccord Capital in Vancouver, where he led a group of investors that took over a junior gold miner shortly before the price of gold doubled. He had another hit when he acquired a uranium asset when the price for that commodity languished.

After cashing out of uranium when its price spiked, Mr. Wasilenkoff started Fortress in 2006, putting up about $2-million of an $8-million private offering. His first moves at Fortress were to buy a banknote and security paper mill in Switzerland and a specialty wallpaper mill in Germany, both of which he viewed as poorly run, niche assets available at near fire-sale prices.

Within a year, he took Fortress public in a $46-million offering. But the stock languished – and then was sunk by the market crisis. By spring 2009, the price had fallen by nearly half from its IPO level.

Fortress’s decline was the kind that makes investors question an unconventional manager like Mr. Wasilenkoff, who favours ball caps and blue jeans as his working attire. Irwin Michael, head of a Toronto money manager that owns about 10 per cent of Fortress, fielded calls from his own investors about his stake in the company.

“You hear all these very descriptive four-letter words,” says Mr. Michael, who manages about $900-million at I.A. Michael Investment Counsel Ltd. “But we hung in. We had a lot of faith in Chad. [He’s] a workaholic, very methodical.”

By this past spring, when operating profit had doubled at the two mills, the stock too had doubled. And it was then Mr. Wasilenkoff sealed the Quebec deal. For $1.2-million, he bought a bankrupt pulp mill in Thurso, Que., a small town 50 kilometres northeast of Parliament Hill. The mill had once turned hardwood pulp into photographic paper, a business done in by digital cameras.

He saw another possibility. He has been a long-time believer in the potential of rayon, a fabric which is enjoying growing demand in Asia as a substitute for cotton, whose global production is in decline. Rayon is made from dissolving pulp and Mr. Wasilenkoff plans to make that dissolving pulp in Thurso.

“He’s not interested in the typical commodity game forestry usually falls into,” said analyst Daryl Swetlishoff at Raymond James. “He’s extremely driven, a very aggressive risk-taker, a grinder. Focused on value. And he’s not pretentious at all.”

Mr. Wasilenkoff figured he needed about $150-million to re-tool the mill. So he lined up veteran Quebec forestry executive Pierre Monahan to connect with the Quebec government. They eventually convinced Investissement Québec, an economic development company, to provide a low-interest loan of up to $102-million, allowing Fortress to make its plan work while putting up just $15-million of its own money.

In the five months since doing the deal, Fortress shares have doubled. Mr. Wasilenkoff’s original $2-million investment in Fortress is worth roughly $80-million today. He remains the company’s biggest shareholder.

He’s convinced more gains are ahead, but analysts at TD Newcrest say Fortress’s valuation might be stretched and worry about the pitfalls of trying to grow too quickly. RBC Dominion Securities said this month it is “very impressed” but added the share price now reflects the value Mr. Wasilenkoff has uncovered.

Mr. Wasilenkoff has always had an eye for value. In elementary school, he scooped up lost golf balls at a course near his childhood home in Calgary and resold them, soon buying and selling everything from Atari cartridges to Robert Bateman prints. He made enough to buy a used Porsche 911 for $15,000 in high school – which resulted in him being accused by a vice-principal of dealing drugs.

An investor since youth, Mr. Wasilenkoff initially wanted to get into property development. He ended up as a broker after getting a two-month temporary gig at Canaccord stapling stock receipts.

His early forays blew up, as he chased gold stocks in the Bre-X era, then got hammered by the tech-stock crash. Chastened, he embraced a deep-value philosophy in which he tried to build deals, rather than simply buying stocks.

What’s next is more deals – but Mr. Wasilenkoff , who previously insisted that he would only be at Fortress for a few more years and eventually start again from scratch, now gives some thought to sticking around longer. “There’s no guarantee that I’ll stop,” he said. “I am having a lot of fun.”